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Month: December 2015

Prologue

One of the first XSSes I have found was the easiest one you can imagine. There are millions, yes – millions, of websites that sanitize users input, but sanitize it wrong.

Why? because they’re agnostics. And because they don’t update their sanitizing algorithm according to the latest black/white hat community discoveries.

Purifying Basics

Basically, user input should never be outputted as HTML code. The server, by rule, should not accept HTML tags, but when you decide to accept them, you need to sanitize properly. Why? Because a small mistake in the regex you are writing will lead users to plant stored or reflective XSSes that will jeopardize your users. And you.

An example of this statement will be an ongoing report of mine.
Tagged.com / Hi5.com is vulnerable to a very simple stored-XSS attack, using a very simple payload, which of course I will not disclose until they’ll fix the issue (the vulnerability submission is waiting for their response since 2015 (!)).
The rule with sophisticated platforms is to kiss (keep it super simple). Known XSSes will probably won’t work, since a trained security team monitors these systems all the time, and the sanitizing algorithm is being updated frequently.

3rd-party Purifiers aren’t always the answer

As you already know, I don’t believe that your security should be protected by 3rd party software. If you are enough of a “big boy” to store sensitive user data (of any kind), you should also be responsible enough to keep this data safe.Use your’e own sanitizing mechanism, based on the simple ‘do not accept HTML/SCRIPT tags’ rule, and on the recent community discoveries.

Test your mechanism, open-source it

Perfection not always has it price (Sorry Stella). A perfect input purifier mechanism will become such one only with the help of the community. Therefore, allow pentesters to challenge your mechanism, when you think its vital enough. @soaj1664ashar did such thing with his version of input purifier. You are strongly advised to look at his post about it (Google it).

Conclusion

To finish up, I’ll leave you with this outstanding quote which basically concludes everything we discussed about: